People in Toronto Share Their Worst Housing Nightmares
Illustrations by Guy Torsher

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People in Toronto Share Their Worst Housing Nightmares

Why do we live here again?

My adventures in Toronto rental land have included the following highlights: two cockroach infestations, living with an ex because neither of us could afford to move, getting price-gouged while subletting, and a gas leak. While the apartment I'm currently living in is well below the average for monthly rent, I deal with a negligent rental company that has had tenants wage a full-on protest against them. It's all pretty commonplace for Toronto.

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The price of a home in Toronto went up 33 percent between March 2016 and March 2017. Renting in the city is increasingly expensive—$1,800 on average for a one-bedroom condo—not to mention even finding a place is difficult and can be time-consuming if you don't have some sort of plug. Inspired by all of the fuckery my friends and I have experienced renting in Canada's largest city, I gathered some housing horror stories from young Torontonians.

Sarah*, 24

I rented an art studio for $375 a month on the outskirts of the city for two months. It was a mostly private space, so if I was quiet enough I could get away with sleeping there. I showered at work and at my boyfriend's and ate out almost every day. I was like, if I can find [an art studio] I might be able to get away with this for a little bit while I try to save up and look for a place because it was summer and next to impossible to find anything. I was in all the [Facebook] groups constantly messaging people… I found a place in Little Italy that was really nice, but it was only a six-month sublet. At the end of the sublet, the landlord decided to kick everyone out to renovate.

It's definitely more competitive than where I'm from and way more expensive. The amount I paid for the art studio I could probably find pretty easily for a room in a very spacious two-bedroom apartment in the city I lived in before. You might be able to find something for that price here, but it would be like a two-foot closet. Not that I'm planning on moving right now, but I'm habitually going through the Bunz Home Zone group because I'm always curiously reading through what's available. I don't know if you ever tried looking for apartments in Bunz, but one listing will go in like an hour because people comment so fucking fast. It's kind of a nightmare.

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Amanda, 36

I was living in a west-end one-bedroom apartment (for $1,425/month) that I really loved; it was sunny and adorable. My landlord was really nice at first, and she didn't live in Toronto but would occasionally come to the city. She called me one day and said, "Hey Amanda, I'm actually going to need my apartment back." She said an alternative would be if I let her move a bunch of furniture in. She had her stuff in a storage unit, and she said she was having issues with it and that they had moved her stuff without consulting her to another unit… She said she didn't trust storage units anymore.

I thought this was a temporary, short-term solution… To me, it seemed the options were to let her to do that, or she would take the apartment back. I panicked in that moment and said, "Yeah, sure." I couldn't even believe how much stuff she moved in. She took up almost the entire living room, a whole closet, she moved in a sofa, a table, shelves. I could still use my living room, sit on the couch and watch TV, but a lot of it was filled with her crap. A few months went by… I sent her a polite email to ask what her plans were for her stuff. She said, "Hey Amanda, at this time I'm going to have to keep storing it there."

One of the items my landlord moved into my unit was an enormous, ugly-ass painting by her mother who had passed away. She hung it on the wall as if she still lived there. I hated it, so I took it down and stored it under my bed. She had to enter my unit during one of her visits and discovered the painting was no longer on the wall. She emailed me asking me to put the painting back up and tried to guilt me by saying her dead mother had painted it. Out of guilt I hung it back up.

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She didn't lower my rent, so I was paying the same amount for less space… She eventually sold her house, and I had to move out anyway. What really pissed me off was she was finally moving her stuff out at that point, and she put her couch and a bunch of her shit on the curb like garbage.

Nathan, 28

For $1,575 a month including utilities, I have a one-bedroom apartment in the Bloordale area [with my partner]. We've been there for about three years now, and it's on the main floor of a house. We've been dealing with a landlord who has very little interest in maintaining the apartment; despite several requests for repairs, we haven't been able to get much done. We're at the point where we're trying to pursue some sort of legal way of forcing the landlord to do repairs—we've had an inspection done by the city.

We have a laundry list of issues. Some of the worst ones: cockroaches (we've had it sprayed three times), issues with mice, ants… When it's gotten sprayed for cockroaches (they're pretty big), it's gotten slightly better but never to the point where they were eliminated completely. Even the types of contractors this landlord will get, the guy who came over to spray our house showed up with this archaic looking spraycan and started squirting around our house. Not really sure he was qualified to be doing it. We have water pressure issues: There are points where you'll be taking a shower, and the water will just shut off completely. We have a porch that goes into our backyard, and some of the stairs were completely falling apart… We were told by a contractor who came to fix the stairs to not use the railing on them because "It's actually just for show." I think it's a common thing with tenants right now is you have an owner of a house who just doesn't want to deal with anything… It's a relatively good situation for the amount of space we have and the fact that we have a private backyard.

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Dani, 30

I was looking for a place to live right out of college with a couple of friends. [We found it] on Craigslist. It was a boarding house situation, and we all rented rooms separately for $550 each [including utilities]. It was a disaster. The previous tenants were partiers. But the landlord said, "Don't worry, it will be clean when you move in." When we moved in, nothing was cleaned… He said he could probably get someone in there in a couple of days. We ended up spending four days cleaning: four bags of garbage from the kitchen, everything was filthy, and the landlord wouldn't even give us a discount on rent for doing the work.

We were too young to realize we could call the tenant board. We just thought This is our lives now. That really set the tone for the rest of the rental. We stayed for a year. He wanted rent in cash and didn't give us receipts, so when tax time rolled around… It was like pulling teeth from him. He didn't maintain the place. We had a problem where a fuse blew. We had no light in our hallway and bathroom, so we were burning candles in our bathroom all the time to be able to see. We told him, and then he just went on vacation for a week and a half.

We got mold in my bedroom closet, all over my stuff… He said that when we moved out, they would just paint over it. We were in our 20s, and there was a [tenant] in the basement who was in his 40s or 50s, and he would come upstairs and yell at us randomly, and the landlord wouldn't do anything about it. We were afraid of this freak living in our basement basically.

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Ashley*, 20

It was a six-month saga. I was renting a two-bedroom (for $1,500 + hydro) at Spadina and Bloor area, and I was living with my boyfriend at the time. We had broken up, which made the situation a lot more complicated because he would take the side of the landlord… She was maybe the craziest woman I have ever met in my life. She put a lot of illegal parts into our lease agreement about how if we wanted to sublet, we'd have to pay a $500 application fee per applicant. I only found out when we started to try to sublet the place for the summer. We had a two-bedroom apartment, so it would be for two applicants. And if she rejected it, we had to pay the application fee again.

We'd been having issues with her for a while. She would just come into our apartment for random renovations that she didn't tell us about. I started doing a bunch of research [on parts of our lease agreement], and then I find out it's not legal. I asked her to give me a breakdown of the $500 cost, and she avoided it for a long time… I showed her it was illegal, and she started to threaten me telling me she had friends at a fancy law firm. She later agreed to lower the cost to $150 for both applicants.

I went to legal counsel. I decided I would pay the fee just to get her off my back. I found these two great guys who were willing to take the place… We submitted the application. They arranged a date when they would meet, on a Saturday. I was working, and I started getting phone calls from my landlord. She's like, "How could you do this to me? You set me up!" She said they were attacking her, telling her she was a horrible person. I contact the [prospective] subletters. Apparently they showed up and she was late, so they called her to ask if she was coming. She started yelling at them over the phone, threatened to sue them… She insulted his voice, started calling him gay. They put her in her place and said she couldn't say things like that.

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The guys said absolutely fucking not we are not living there… It felt like she was trying to prevent a sublet from happening so we would have to pay for the summer months. We ended up finding another girl who was willing to sublet. The same thing started happening again. But we got to the point where we were all together about to sign the lease, and my landlord starts acting up again, bringing up things that are very illegal… The girl ended up agreeing to it, and we felt so bad. But we needed to get out of the situation.

[My partner and I] broke up in February, so we had to live together for about three months after that. I moved out in April because the relationship started to get really toxic and abusive, he was emotionally deteriorating me to the point where my mom stepped in and told me I had to get out of it.

It was maybe the biggest headache of my life so far. It was during exam season too… She owns the whole complex and several other properties. We moved out in 2016, and the price of our old unit has now been hiked up to $1,900. The rental company's thing is renting to students. Their whole target market is people who are uneducated about renting and this is probably their first apartment, which is how they get away with taking advantage.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

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